20th century
A01=Kang Zhengguo
Author_Kang Zhengguo
autobiography
beijing
Category=DNBA
Category=NHF
chinese
chinese gulag
communism
communist
cultural history
cultural revolution
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
labor camps
mao
memoir
shaanxi normal university
tang dynasty
totalitarianism
true story
Product details
- ISBN 9780393332001
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 142 x 211mm
- Publication Date: 05 Aug 2008
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This “gripping and poignant memoir” (New York Times Book Review) draws us into the intersections of everyday life and Communist power from the first days of “Liberation” in 1949 through the post-Mao era. The son of a professional family, Kang Zhengguo is a free spirit, drawn to literature. In Mao’s China, these innocuous circumstances expose him at age twenty to a fierce struggle session, expulsion from university, and a four-year term of hard labor. So begins his long stay in the prison-camp system. He finally escapes the Chinese gulag by forfeiting his identity: at age twenty-eight he is adopted by an aging bachelor in a peasant village, which enables him to start a new life.
Kang Zhengguo is senior lector of Chinese at Yale University. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Susan Wilf teaches at George School in Pennsylvania and was awarded a PEN Translation Fund Grant for Confessions.
